Press A To Jump

A short Super Mario 64 mod created for a game jam, adding original mechanics and a new level to the game. This mod scored 17th place out of 82 entries.

Overview

• Date: July 2023-August 2023

• Duration: 1 Month

• Team Size: 1

• Role: Solo Designer

• Genre: Platformer/Rage Game

• Platform: Nintendo 64
  

Responsibilities

• Designed an original mod for Super Mario 64 for a month-long mod jam where participants were challenged to create a “troll” or “rage game” experience out of the game’s core framework.

• Learned the codebase of HackerSM64, a C-based Super Mario 64 decompilation project, in order to implement new mechanics into an existing game.

• Learned Blender to design and import an original level showcasing the hack’s new mechanics.

Postmortem

While I had dabbled in modding Super Mario 64 several times in the past, the announcement of this competition, taking place right in the middle of my summer break, finally gave me the motivation to sit down and commit to making a finished experience. Between my prior attempts and this one, the Super Mario 64 decompilation, which reverse-engineered the game into an open-source C project, was released, allowing people to mod the game in a much more readable language than the compiled assembly code. Inspired by this new development, I decided to design a new mechanic that the hack would be centered around. Knowing I only had one month to create the hack, I made sure to keep my scope low, in order to allow myself to also keep up with my summer job and have some time to take breaks and avoid burnout. While there are some surface-level tutorials on using HackerSM64, most of my learning had to rely on reading the code myself and understanding how to apply it to the things I wanted to do.